I use magic aswell, I have enchanted my armor with health and stamina regen (+26% faster), my magic is pretty good. I OFTEN use weapons, just make advant of your perks, so your magic won't cost you that much. You can also enchant your armor with magic regen.

Yeah, well that's just like....your opinion man!Anyway, some people like the challenge of playing a pure mage. I use magic as a boost to straight combat. Blasting an archer with a lighting bolt to take him down while his buddy is charging right into my sword is fun.That's the thing about this game, everyone plays their own way and no way is wrong....... Ok....those people (and I use the term loosely) who create MLP mods are very very wrong.

I do take spells in my other hand but still unless you spend your skill points upgrading magic. Oblivion's magic system was alot better because you could have a weapon, sheild, and magic all at the same time.

I don't use any magic related mods and find Skyrim magic greatly overpowered. My previous mage character was literally incinerating dragons from the sky, turning enemy masses fighting against eachother and had maximum 80% damage reduction without any armor - whenever it counted to have it for awhile. Impact perk with it's 100% time staggering effect threw the game balance off completely.

Having Ulfric Stormcloak as you undead zombie follower made the whole thing even more ridiculously overpowered, when he used shouts against enemies. I actually got bored and went back to melee character.

The magic system in Skyrim isn't my favorite either, but I can't see why anyone would concider it useless, when it powerful enough to make you loose all the challenge from the game.

I personally think that magic isn't the most efficient way to fight, especially when you're just starting out with a new character. Magic takes forever to level up if you're playing on a harder difficulty like master or legendary, whereas when you're fighting with a weapon, you can level it up pretty easily. Not to mention, quite a few of the races start out with their one-handed skill at 20 rather than 15 like the other skills, so it automatically gets an advantage.

I personally think that magic isn't the most efficient way to fight, especially when you're just starting out with a new character. Magic takes forever to level up if you're playing on a harder difficulty like master or legendary

Alteration and Illusion actually level much faster than any combat skill. New character with Fury, Calm, Sparks, your favorite conjuration spell and Oakflesh can rule almost any battle.

just like any skill in the game magic start out weak, the more you lvl it up and put perks into it the more dmg you can do. and the high lvl spells are lock till you do the quest lines for them. with that said i really miss the ingame spellcrafting from TES3